Slides : RecordingFrom the strict rectangles of structured data to the more generous triangles of semistructured data. This morning’s lecture gave an overview of what kind of data is seen as “semistructured”; the idea of trees as a mathematical model of data; the particular form of trees in the XPath data model; and their textual representation in XML — the Extensible Markup Language.
XML also has a large number of domain-specific variants. These are all valid XML, and use standardised sets of element types to give a custom language for representing data relevant to a particular field: from musical scores to financial trading.
Links: Slides for Lecture 9; Recording
Homework
1. Read This
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XML Essentials from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
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Sections 2.1–2.5 from Chapter 2 of Møller and Schwartzbach. I have sent a scanned PDF of this chapter to all students by email; there will also be printed copies outside the ITO in Forrest Hill; and you can find the whole book in the Library HUB.
2. Do This
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Find an SVG file and open it in a text editor to study its XML content.
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Find a Microsoft Office
.docx
file and look at the XML content in that. This format (OOXML) is in fact a zipped archive of XML files, so you will need to unzip it first. Depending on your platform, this may require renaming the.docx
extension as.zip
References
To learn more about XML, try any of the following.
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Read more of An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies, the book in today’s homework reading. There are copies available right now in the Main Library HUB.
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Work through the MusicXML tutorial.
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Browse the full XML specification.
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Have at look at some documents in the Financial Products Markup Language: such as a composite basket equity swap or a European swaption straddle. The full site has dozens of such examples.
Original Research Inside the Database
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Discovery of Peculiar Periodic Spectral Modulations in a Small Fraction of Solar-type Stars Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 128, Number 969, November 2016. “… generated by extraterrestrial intelligence.” Link: Paper |
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Strange messages coming from the stars are ‘probably’ from aliens, scientists say The Independent Andrew Griffin, Monday 24 October 2016 Link: Article |